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I got an email a couple of weeks ago from a friend in Switzerland who recommended that I try out a Zattoo.com. Zattoo offers live TV on your PC for Europeans. Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem to work in the U.S. (It must be restricted by IP address.)

The programming on Zattoo, frankly, looks like an ex-expatriate’s dream, with channels including BBC Prime, Eurosport, TF1, ZDF, France2, Sat 1, and Rai Uno. I will have to wait until this spring when I visit to see it myself. If anyone has given it a try, please let me know.

Juiced?Then the other day I was reading about a friend of a friend who has just published a book entitled, The Royal Nonesuch. In that I had not seen the fellow for a couple years I checked out his blog and read about Joost, which I’d heard rumblings about in the past. Joost is a venture by the guys who created Skype, Niklus Zennstrom and Janus Friis.

I’ve applied for the beta testing of Joost and am waiting to get access. The technology uses the same peer-to-peer connection that is used in Skype. It sounds interesting and I will let you know what it looks like.

More on OLPC later. I have opinions on that I urgently want to share, but not to day.

Think that $250 million is a lot of money even to a G-8 country? $250 million represents almost exactly what Halliburton was reimbursed when the U.S. Army decided, in February 2006, not to dispute the company’s cost accounting, even though the Pentagon’s own auditors had identified those costs as potentially excessive.

I’ve been playing around with Tor and Vidalia for a while now. Tor is a tool for hiding browsing information and Vidalia is the management tool for the “onion skin” routers that one bounces through when using Tor.

The Tor/Vidalia and, now, Torpark, remind me a little bit of TriangleBoy, which was a tool developed in the to anonymously surf the web. TriangleBoy was developed with money from the NSA.

Anyway, Torpark is really cool in that it is less of a hassle than Tor/Vidalia bundle. I will give a more thorough review later, but for now there seems to be a few sites that have picked up on its release.

Ambient Devices, a company started by “former Massachussetts Institute of Technology students” (n.b., one might think graduates, but apparently CNET thinks they’re a too old for such nomenclature), has a series of devices that would look brilliant on any office worker’s desk.These have to be checked out. I want one.

The products range from a device that can show pollen count, emails, and market activity in analog, to a glow-worm like ball that sits on your desk that changes colors according to a range of things you might want to track (e.g., traffic congestion).The devices aren’t cheap, but they will make an impression.